Shinola Is Building A Brand Its Own Way
Image via AdWeek.
Shinola is a brand that is by and large making up its own rules as it goes – beginning with the name Shinola itself.
The Detroit-based luxury goods company, owned by entrepreneur (and FTF: Conference speaker) Tom Kartsotis’ Bedrock Manufacturing Co., acquired the rights to the name Shinola in 2011; previously, it had been the moniker for a shoe polish company founded in 1907. But the word took on a new life around the time of World War II, when, as AdWeek explains in a profile of the brand, “a disgruntled GI polished his commander’s boots with poop, proclaiming that he ‘wouldn’t know shit from Shinola.'”
The saying found its way into the pop-culture lexicon and remained there well after the original Shinola went out of business in the 1960’s. It’s an audacious and somewhat counter-intuitive place to start when building a luxury brand that aims to reclaim Detroit’s mantle as the center of quality US manufacturing by providing upscale goods, including its signature watches that rival Swiss-made designs in price. It’s also, as AdWeek notes, not an advisable connotation with which to woo potential investors.
But, none of that seems to have mattered.
In fact, since its launch four years ago, Shinola has seen great success by leaning into the recognizable nature of the name. Sometimes they’ve done this subtly; Shinola has a sort of familiarity, CMO Bridget Russo tells AdWeek, that consumers connect with previous generations, and, by extension, the “heyday of American manufacturing.” Other times, the connection between the famous WWII-era expression and the current brand is made more explicit, as when a recent sketch on Jimmy Kimmel Live, endorsed by the brand, tested contestants on whether or not they would be able to tell shit from Shinola – literally.
It undoubtedly helps that all of Shinola’s branding is consistent to a T. Shinola’s retail stores, which Russo says are integral to the overall image of the brand, are all minimalist, industrial spaces. That its goods are, for the most part, made and assembled in the US is the key talking point: taglines used in marketing materials include both “Where American is made” and “Built in Detroit.”
That strong branding lends itself well to Shinola’s plans for the future and expansion into new product categories.
“We’ve never thought of ourselves as just a watch brand but as a design brand,” Russo told AdWeek. “Tomorrow, we could make a toaster, as long as it’s well made and made in the U.S.”
